I am an author, speaker, business strategist, and consultant for clients ranging up to the Fortune 100. During a 33-year career I have started seven businesses—six were successful and one not. In 2010 I published the book "Indispensable By Monday" (Wiley & Sons), and am now working on a second book, "Making Intrapreneurs."
I am founder and CEO of By Monday, Inc., an intrapreneurship and employee engagement consulting firm near Salt Lake City, and enjoy lecturing and researching at BYU as an adjunct professor in the Entrepreneur Center. Having served as the president of VitalSmarts for nine years and earned an MBA, I teach a unique mix of the “soft” and “hard” skills needed in business today. Our clients’ bottom-line success is imperative, but we get there by engaging and supporting people. lmyler@bymonday.com

Innovation Is Problem Solving...And A Whole Lot More

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and I believe them, whoever they are. We can all agree that a problem can be a catalyst for a solution, and that many business innovations are born of business challenges. But is it really that simple? Perhaps innovation is more nuanced than that. As we examine four distinct levels of innovation, try to determine what your contribution to innovation is, and what it could be.

Level 1: Problem Solving. This is a reactive approach to innovation. If embraced in an orderly fashion—meaning, if the innovator is discriminating about which problems to take on and how solutions should be crafted and applied—this first level of innovation can be both powerful and prolific. However, the sometimes frenzied, stimulus-response nature of this style of innovation can often limit people to lower-value contributions. We all know co-workers who spend most of their time putting out fires, which is not necessarily a bad thing (fires can do a lot of damage), but the danger of constantly dealing with the urgent, at the expense of the important, is obvious. Joe Randolph, CEO of the Innovation Institute in La Palma, California, observes, “Problems do create the necessary urgency to innovate, but they can also overwhelm. In my experience, more than 90% of employees are fixated on dealing with day-to-day workload and emergencies, rather than looking toward the future.”

Level 2: Problem Prevention. What if a problem hasn’t happened yet, but lies in the future in the form of a risk? Heading off a problem before it happens is a more proactive practice than trying to solve it after it hits the fan. Innovators who can respond in advance to looming legislation, coming competitive threats, changing customer preferences, and technological advances, can be more valuable to an organization than a reactive problem-solver. But there is less squeaky-wheel urgency attached to potential problems, so innovators often find it difficult to rally the right resources to make change happen.

Level 3: Continuous Improvement. Rise above current and future problems and you will notice the processes, policies, and products that are working quite well. Not a problem in sight. But that doesn’t mean there is no need for innovation. This is where the myth, “all innovation comes from solving problems,” breaks down. In the opinion of Gregory Hicks, Director IT Innovation R&D at Optum, “Because the market is always moving, to rest when things are going well is exactly the wrong response. When the organization has comfortably adapted to its most recent improvements, that’s generally a signal to the innovator that it’s time to drive another set of innovations forward.”

This is also where what I call the Problem Paradox begins. If it ain’t broke, break it is a fun maxim, and an interesting book (you’re welcome, Robert Kriegel), but we should all be aware that breaking, streamlining, or replacing a perfectly good business system, albeit for the greater good in the end, creates real problems in the near-term. For a while, you’ll be back to Level 1.

Level 4: Creation of a New Future. This is the ultimate challenge for those who would innovate, and perhaps the greatest “problem” faced by every organization. With today’s unprecedented pace of change, the pressure on companies to reinvent themselves is relentless. It is sobering to consider the number of companies heralded in books like Built to Last and Good to Great that have since fallen into mediocrity or worse. Disruptive forces are constantly lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce on unwary, and therefore unprepared, successful companies. Staying relevant and competitive is no easy task. One remedy for this persistent problem can be found in the practice of creating Engineered Collisions, a term borrowed from Scott Dulchavsky, CEO of the Henry Ford Innovation Institute in Michigan. “We generate meetings between people who would not normally get together, and ask them to address issues they would not ordinarily talk about,” describes Dulchavsky. “When we put smart people with disparate backgrounds in the same room, they come up with always-wild and sometimes-brilliant solutions.”

If you know of leaders who are wild and brilliant innovators, let me know. I’d like to write about them.

Larry Myler is an adjunct professor at the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at BYU. lmyler@bymonday.com

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.